Murder most foul

A Great Deliverance - Elizabeth George (Bantam Dell, 1988)

Shortly after I moved to Orange County, three different people recommended Elizabeth George to me. It may have been partly coincidence, or it may have had something to do with the fact that she was an Orange County resident writing British mysteries. At any rate, she's been on my to-do list for awhile, until finally a copy of her first Inspector Lynley book made its way to me.

There's a rather huge cast of characters and the book visits all of them. The two inspectors, several people in some way near the crime - a farmer beheaded, his daughter confessed to the killing, but clearly something is off - and a few others who are more peripherally involved in the world of Scotland Yard. It gets a bit confusing, but allows for all sorts of red herrings.

Lynley and Havers find the whole situation ominous and unsettling from the start, but it took awhile for me to understand why, and while the climax made sense, I didn't see it coming. I found the relationship between them more interesting, as each battles his or her own inner demons. I suppose that is more how mysteries are supposed to work anyway.

We Need to Talk

We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver (Harper Perennial, 2003)

Do you believe me that I picked out this book to read next before Aurora happened? The idea of reading a novel about the aftermath (ish) of a mass shooting seemed a little much to handle, but I pushed on. And was in the thick of it when the Oak Creek shooting occurred. All of which could send me off on a diatribe about violence and weapons and cavalier disregard for the sanctity of human life and and and.

But no. This novel has too much to say on its own. The Post-Birthday World is one of my favorite novels - although no one I've foisted it on has enjoyed it as much as I did - but this one is the award-winner. And it was time to tackle something difficult.

It's November 2000, about 18 months after Eva's son changed their worlds forever by murdering a handful of classmates and two school staff members, about a week before Columbine. And Eva shares her story in epistolary fashion, in a series of letters to her estranged husband. The result is three narratives that unfold over about six months, with the final letter in April 2001. The first is world events; remember that election? and how it dominated everything? The second takes us back in time, as Eva details the couple's decision to have a baby, and the child's early years. The third is also current, about her ongoing relationship with Kevin, her visits to him in the juvenile prison upstate, as she strives to come to terms - to the extent such a phrase even makes sense - with his horrific acts, and her part in them.

Never has anything made me so scared about the prospect of having a child. From even before his birth, Eva was uneasy about Kevin. And Kevin made everyone uneasy except her husband, who desperation to adore his own son is so touchingly naive as seen through Eva's eyes. Whether or not Kevin was really a sociopath from Day One, how terrifying to consider not loving your own child.

And then some sort of trigger switched inside me. Eva does this complicated dance, of assuming all the responsibility for Kevin and his actions, and simultaneously abjuring it in favor of an argument that sort of runs, "I tried to warn you about him." It made me uncomfortable, which I can only assume was Shriver's intent. As are the growing signs that maybe Eva really is to blame, that maybe Kevin has always, desperately, sought his mother's love and affection. That maybe his malicious attacks on people's passions were both a way of destroying what he didn't have and couldn't abide in others. And even more so, a cry for his mom to notice and love him.

I feel terribly inarticulate trying to get at what I mean. Besides, did I really just place the responsibility for all these murders on this poor woman's shoulders? Plenty of people have awful parents who they fear don't really love them, and the vast majority of these people do not become killers at age 15. It's pretty much bullshit to absolve Kevin of any responsibility. And yet, I fear he just wanted to impress her. Although impress isn't quite the right word.

Before I fall too deeply down a rabbit hole, let me just say what I probably should have said in summary from the very start: this novel disquieted me in ways that few novels have. I will be thinking about Kevin for a long time to come.

A likely match

Sex, Lies, and Online Dating - Rachel Gibson (Avon Books, 2006)

Lenny and Eunice were really bringing me down. This totally beautiful and heartfelt story, no matter how satirically presented, was a little more than I could handle. Especially because it was, as promised, "super sad."

So I needed another love story to read in tandem. Enter Rachel Gibson. She writes contemporary romance novels, and first caught my eye (in a Booklist capsule review maybe?) because at least a few of her titles center around the fictitious NHL Seattle Chinooks. Yay hockey players! This one does not, but our protagonist is a fan of the minor-league team in Boise.

In addition to liking hockey, Lucy is a mystery writer who has decided to tackle the subject of a serial killer who meets men on dating sites and then sends them to their death via erotic asphyxiation. So she has to date some for research. The trouble is that someone in the city is acting out her book, even while it's still being written. Which leads her to Quinn, a cop who is dating around in hopes of drawing out the killer, who is, obviously, Lucy. Right? Blah blah immediate physical connection, growing emotional attachment, annoyance at lies and concerns about how the other one feels, etc. In short, the perfect antidote to Lenny and Eunice. So just what I needed.

Murder and strange times

Duplicate Keys - Jane Smiley (Fawcett Columbine, 1984)

I like Jane Smiley a lot. I haven't read all that much by her, but seeing her was pretty much always a highlight of the LA Times Festival of Books. So when I finished 2666 and needed something witty and lighter, I saw this on my bookshelf and grabbed it.

Then I read the back cover.

It's about the aftermath of a murder within a circle of friends in NYC, circa 1980. I thought to myself, this is probably not the right book for right now, but I read it anyway. So really, is it the book's fault that I didn't like it? Maybe, maybe not. I'm discovering that I don't like much of the fiction that I read from the 70s and early 80s. I can't identify with the period, and it just seems so foreign. So that's probably part of it.

Anyway, it's a pretty good mystery. Alice, a librarian (and I'm not sure what I think about the portrayal of the profession), finds two friends shot when she comes over to water the plants. While part of a tight-knit group of friends, she finds that the group's bonds have been stretched to (and past) the breaking point. And while she is trying to find her way through the aftermath of the killings, she also shows that she's essentially in love with her best friend, is still trying to recover from her divorce, likes or doesn't like the new guy she starts sleeping with, etc. I found Alice's mind difficult to keep up with - she was a big bundle of self-contradiction. Which would normally be fine, but it didn't work for me this time. Also? I totally knew who the killer was. Maybe it wasn't supposed to come as a surprise?

While Alice is being vaguely bipolar, she also has a lot (a LOT) of conversation with her friend Susan, the longtime partner of one of the dead men. And Susan has this to say:

But what if your self damages the other person? People look so discrete, as if they are a certain way. But obviously, a lot of the time that you're mad at them for being a certain way, it's actually you who's making them be that way.

Hmm. Food for thought. And now I have to go soak this book so I can document my efforts to dry it for a class assignment. Fun! :)

2666 - The Part about the Crimes

4. The Part about the Crimes

(Parts 1, 2, & 3)

Wow. ...just, wow.

Here's the section about the murders of the women in Santa Teresa. It's about 280 pages long, and when it starts with about 10 pages of murders starting in 1993, you wonder if this is what Bolaño has in store for you: an individual accounting of each woman killed in Santa Teresa. If that's all he had done, it would have been tremendous, and a statement, a reminder when you're talking about hundreds and thousands of killings that each one is its own story too. But no, interspersed is the reaction by the authorities and others. So we learn about a few detectives and policemen, an arts reporter from Mexico City who starts covering the murders, and a bunch of other people, including the suspect who gets nabbed as the serial killer, even as the murders continue while he is in prison.

It's along the way that you start to wonder if you missed something and should have been paying more attention during the previous sections. Were there clues left for you? Did you miss it? (Or maybe you aren't wondering, because perhaps you actually caught it, unlike me.) Or are they red herrings?

Also, to revisit a point above. What comes out of reading is the realization that there isn't a single killer or band of killers. It's that somehow, for whatever reason, in Santa Teresa there has arisen a climate in which the killing of women has grown essentially permissible. They become statistics, to paraphrase a great mass murderer. It becomes an indictment of something much larger than it seems.

But typing these thoughts, muddled as they are, I feel that they are sort of trite. They don't do the section justice. Trust me.

And the fun quote of the section, referring to a medical examiner:

Sometimes he thought it was precisely because he was an atheist that he didn't read anymore. Not reading, it might be said, was the highest expression of atheism or at least of atheism as he conceived of it. If you don't believe in God, how do you believe in a fucking book?

Interred with their Bones, or the Da Vinci Code for Shakespeare

I was mainly writing papers last weekend, but somehow I also found time to read a fun little mystery a la Dan Brown about Shakespeare. I had heard about this book on a podcast so figured when I saw it at the library that I deserved a change from library science, political blogs, and teenage vampires. (Seriously, what do I read these days?) (Edit: just wrote another two paragraphs without noticing that I hadn't given any other info on the book. It's Interred with their Bones (or "The Shakespeare Secret" outside of the US apparently) by Jennifer Lee Carrell.)

Like with Da Vinci Code, as well as I can remember it, there are two major plots tracking together. The first is the historical treasure hunt, with information that threatens to blow up everything we thought we knew about a historical figure. In this case, it's about a missing Shakespeare play... oh, and his very identity. The second is the willingness of someone to kill to keep the information safe.

I like to think I'm decently perceptive. But when I read or watch mysteries, I really don't get it sooner than the average person. I like to think this is because I enjoy the discovery process more than being right all along, but really, I have no idea if this is true. What is true is that I figured out the twists on the murder plot pretty quickly, and wasn't convinced when Carrell starting throwing up new misinformation. That was a suprise. On the other hand, I didn't mind all that much, because the far more interesting part was trying to follow her and her characters as they march through Elizabethan, Jacobian, and Shakespearean history, plus an overview of the major controversies of Shakespeare scholarship. It made me realize that I totally do not know my Shakespeare well enough. Have I read any of the English king plays? I don't think so. Or Lear? Have I read Lear? (Why, in my "Shakespeare's England" course in college, did we only read Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus? It was a history course, but still...)

I digress. The book is fun, but still sufficiently intelligent. And nicely creepy for curling up in bed at night.

Roundup

Between work and illness over the last couple weeks, I just haven't felt like blogging. I have been reading some though, when I can steal time.

First off, I am all set for next week's inaugural book club meeting. We'll be discussing The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood, a book that I owned but was likely never going to get around to reading. Oddly enough, my main association with Atwood is the short story "Rape Fantasies" which we read in my AP English class. Anyway, I'll write about the book after the meeting, but suffice it to say that I was apprehensive about it; I don't often like dystopias, and 1980s feminist versions seemed intimidating. But. In the end I really enjoyed it, and was particularly fascinated by the coda chapter.

Speaking of Canadian female writers and rape fantasies, the anniversary issue of the New Yorker featured a short story by Alice Munro that addresses age, fear and fearlessness, and guile in the face of male violence. Thumbs up to "Free Radicals."

The article in that issue that I went crazy for, however, was David Grann's "True Crime" (sadly, the link is just to an abstract, but the article is AWESOME). It's couched as "a postmodern murder mystery" and I think would make a fantastic movie. A Polish detective, looking at a cold case, connects it to an author who wrote (shortly after the murder) a strange, violent, and disturbed novel that may or may not have some connection to the case. Grann talks about the suspect's philosophical bent, and desire to be a Nietzschean superman mixed with Derridean suspicion of language and truth. Oh, and the book - and maybe the murder case - are deeply intertwined with Dostoyevsky and Crime & Punishment. Ooh, I get goosebumps just thinking about how good this article was.

Also happening: BCAM was a lot of fun and hooray for free tickets. And I started reading another new book that was making me apprehensive: Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants. I was like "hmm, this book has been on the paperback best-sellers list for ages. It must be good." So I checked it out and then found out it was about the circus. But 70 pages in, I am pleasantly surprised. Thank goodness.